AI chief Fei-Fei Li to scale back role at Google Cloud

Credit Tristan Greene

Cecil Davis
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13 September, 2018, 17:45

"A Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) student newspaper on Sunday reported that the dean of the school's computer science department, Andrew Moore, was leaving the school for an unknown opportunity", The Next Web (TNW) reported late on Monday.

Li, a venerated researcher in the field of AI, is returning to Stanford University, where she was a professor before joining Google about two years ago.

Google's use of AI made headlines earlier this year when employees protested Project Maven, a military AI project using the company's image recognition software. As the third-place competitor, behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud industry, Google's unit leans heavily on its AI tools to lure potential clients.

Li joined the search engine giant in 2016 and helped create applications that the company could package for businesses that buy its cloud services. She was also half of Google's switch to initiate an AI lab in Beijing, China.Li's dash with Google hadn't continually been at ease sailing, even though.

CEO of Google Cloud, Diane Greene, said that Li's team has "innovated and done a remarkable job of accelerating the adoption of AI and ML [machine learning] by developers and Google Cloud customers". Google said everything is moving according to plan.

Dr. Moore is now the dean of the School of Computer Science at CMU and will be joining the team at the end of 2018.

Moore previously worked at Google between 2006 and 2014. "We are proud that Fei-Fei will be returning to Stanford to continue her leadership in the field of AI in the academic environment, and we're thrilled that we will still be able to continue to work with her as an advisor".

In March, six months after the Project Maven deal was signed, Li penned an op-ed for The New York Times titled, How to Make AI That's Good for People.